Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
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Zhong and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers analyzed free-text comments from 25 autistic and 25 non-autistic adults with aphantasia, matched for age, who answered one open-ended question at the end of an online survey. Comments fell under imagery, thinking, and emotions and social life; more non-autistic people mentioned imagery in other senses, mostly describing it as intact, while more autistic people described themselves as thinking in words. Many described memories as known facts rather than relived scenes, and some described knowing an emotion without feeling it. The group differences rest on small numbers and a single question.
Knight, Milton and Zeman · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasics showed normal visual working memory performance and decodable neural representations in the visual cortex. This suggests aphantasia is a lack of conscious awareness rather than an inability to generate or store visual information.
Zeman and colleagues · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Replying to a proposal that aphantasia reflects broken mental "rendering," this letter argues that conscious object imagery is unlikely to be a useless by-product. Links with memory, empathy and emotion suggest it may support social life.
Noble and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
In brain scans of 58 people, more vivid imagery was weakly linked to more complex activity in the lower temporal lobes, and not only while imagining. The authors speculate that excess neural noise may underlie aphantasia.
Zeman · Neuropsychologia
Ten years after aphantasia was named, Adam Zeman argues it likely has several subtypes and that most abilities are spared, with memory for one's own past differing most. He urges an open mind in this young field.
Zeman and colleagues · Cortex
This short definition, published in a special issue of the journal Cortex, describes aphantasia as the absence or near-absence of imagery, most often the inability to picture things while fully awake, as opposed to simply thinking about them. Aphantasia affects deliberate imagery, may affect spontaneous imagery, and often leaves imagery in dreams intact. It can be lifelong or acquired, and the note proposes labels such as visual, auditory, multisensory and global aphantasia, while recording that some researchers keep the word for vision alone.
Zeman · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
About 1% of people report no visual imagery and about 3% report imagery as vivid as seeing, and objective tests are starting to back these reports up. The review suggests conscious imagery is not needed for thinking or creativity.
MacKisack and colleagues · Art Journal
Artists with aphantasia create work through external interaction with materials rather than internal mental preconfiguration. This demonstrates that artistic creativity does not require visual imagery and can emerge from diverse neurocognitive processes.
Monzel and colleagues · Cortex
In a short reply within a debate over names, the authors argue for keeping one term, aphantasia, for absent or markedly reduced voluntary imagery in any sense, with a word added for the sense involved, such as visual or auditory aphantasia, or multisensory aphantasia when all senses are affected. They describe hyperphantasia as the opposite: imagery said to rival real perception. They note that many people with aphantasia report rare spontaneous flashes of imagery or imagery in dreams, and that lacking imagery does not mean lacking imagination.
Monzel and colleagues · Cortex
Five researchers argue that 'aphantasia' already covers missing imagery in any sense and should stay the single term. They suggest 'auditory' or 'multisensory aphantasia' rather than new words such as 'anauralia' and 'dysikonesia'.
Knowles, Jones and Zeman · Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry
In 88 people who lost their visual imagery, the commonest triggers were head injury, mood disorders and stroke. This suggests acquired aphantasia can follow both neurological and psychological disorders.
Keogh, Pearson and Zeman · Handbook of Clinical Neurology
This review chapter covers how imagery is measured and where it arises in the brain, imagery lost after brain injury or psychiatric illness, and lifelong aphantasia and hyperphantasia. It reports that people with aphantasia score low on an objective imagery test and on questionnaires, report fewer intrusive memories, often describe weaker recall of their own past, and do well on visual working memory tasks using other strategies such as labeling. It ends by asking whether aphantasia could be reversed: brain stimulation has strengthened imagery in people with average imagery, but whether that works for people with none remains open.
Milton and colleagues · Cerebral Cortex Communications
People with aphantasia matched others on standard memory tests but recalled fewer details of past events and imagined scenes. The authors suggest weaker links between frontal control areas and visual areas may explain the missing imagery.
Dance and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Across two large samples, grapheme-color synesthesia was as common in people with aphantasia as in others. In a separate study, 118 people with aphantasia reported more autistic traits than controls, mainly in imagination and social skills.
Zeman and colleagues · Cortex
Questionnaires from 2,000 people with aphantasia and 200 with hyperphantasia linked aphantasia to science jobs and self-reported poor memory of past events, hyperphantasia to creative jobs. Imagery extremes appear tied to wider traits.
Fulford and colleagues · Cortex
Low-vividness imagers activate a more widespread set of brain regions during visualization than high-vividness imagers. This suggests that individuals with weak mental imagery may use compensatory neural effort to perform imagery tasks.
MacKisack and colleagues · Frontiers in Psychology
The paper traces the long philosophical history of mental imagery, from Aristotelian "phantasma" to behaviorist skepticism. This historical context reveals that modern neuroscientific debates over imagery's role in cognition are rooted in centuries of conflicting intellectual traditions.
Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala · Cortex
In a short reply to colleagues who suggested some aphantasia may be psychological in origin, the authors agree that mood and other psychological factors can change imagery and should be assessed, but call the old split between psychological and physical causes dubious, since both act through the brain. The 21 people with lifelong aphantasia from their earlier questionnaire study, most of whom still had imagery in dreams or brief flashes, described a stable difference with few emotional effects, so the authors doubt that psychological problems play a major role in lifelong aphantasia.
de Vito and Bartolomeo · Cortex
Researchers suggest that aphantasia can have psychogenic origins linked to conditions like anxiety and depersonalization. This indicates that clinical evaluations of imagery loss should include psychopathological examinations.
Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala · Cortex
Of 21 people with lifelong weak or absent voluntary imagery, most still had involuntary images, as brief flashes or in dreams. The authors named this aphantasia and suspect it is a variation in brain function, akin to synesthesia.